Sam Gentle.com

Omniserver

I started wondering something while messing around with those little ESP chips: how hard would it be to make a server that responds with a particular message using every protocol? I mean you would set it up to say something like "robots rule OK", or do its best to deliver this hilarious dog picture. And then you could connect to it via anything: web, mail, telnet, ssh, dns, gopher...

Obviously every protocol would be pretty difficult, because there are just so many, and a lot that you wouldn't even be able to find documentation for. But, maybe the entire well-known port range. Depending on where you look, that's between 250 and 1000 services. Which, at first blush, seems pretty difficult. But I bet a bunch of them would be trivial, and after a while you'd find a lot of similarities.

A silly project, maybe, but it'd be pretty fun to go spelunking through the docs for all these old protocols and understand them well enough to pull together a hello world style implementation. Plus, who knows, maybe someday you'll be in a situation that desperately needs the ability to transmit a dog picture over pop2.